I am not usually to be found defending the Home Office but, on the "NatWest Three" bail issue, it is being blamed unfairly. The three accused men, following their extradition to Houston to face fraud charges, were last week granted bail but not allowed to return to Britain. The judge was influenced by letters from the Home Office and Crown Prosecution Service which, in effect, said the authorities here were in no position to supervise or enforce bail conditions imposed by a US court.

The men had offered to surrender their passports, report regularly to the police and be tagged. These are conditions the courts can impose on defendants on trial here; they have no legal power to do so for a foreign court. Even if the English authorities had offered to help on a purely informal basis, what would have been expected of them if a defendant had broken bail conditions? If he was missing, would the police have tried to trace him, then arrest him? Of course not. They would have had no power or duty to do so. The Home Office was right to refuse to take on responsibility for the men.

· The names of the new QCs were published last week. The statistics with the list informed us there were 175 appointments, involving 141 men and 33 women. Gifted in arithmetic as I am, I soon discovered the flaw in that presentation. A footnote told me one person had not revealed his or her sex. That did not mean the information was unknown: on the contrary, the name of the refusenik was ascertainable - by looking up past records. Without knowing the name of the person, it took me just five minutes to find through Google those lawyers whose first names might be a touch ambiguous; their sex was immediately revealed. Perhaps the purveyors of the QC list knew who it was, but were acceding to a request for privacy. That would be too bizarre. Someone applies for silk and, on being successful, becomes all coy about their gender? That is shrinks territory. Note to the sums people: the 175th QC is a man.

· Several prosecutions brought by Customs in recent years collapsed embarrassingly when it was discovered that the department's investigators had been acting, in effect, as agents provocateurs. So it was decided to transfer decisions to prosecute in such cases to a new, independent, revenue and customs prosecution office, which began work last year. Inspections scrutinised its decisions.

So far so good. Except that when this year the inspectors wanted to do their job the office told them they had no legal right to do so. After months of discussion and opinion from top lawyers it turned out that, in the legislation concerned with setting up the office, someone had forgotten to make the inspectors an exception to the rule that protects the confidentiality of case files.